


another 'x' on the calendar

by southspinner



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-01-16
Packaged: 2019-03-05 19:40:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13394847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: When you live forever, you stop counting your life in seconds and days and years, start plotting your mark upon the universe with those moments, the important ones that stick with you and sink down to your center, that make it impossible for your soul to forget.A gift for TAZ Candlenights Exchange!





	another 'x' on the calendar

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MercuryHomophony](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryHomophony/gifts).



> So, this is a piece for MercuryHomophony, who was my match for the TAZ Candlenights Exchange! I mixed two of your prompts (snapshots into the lives of NPCS after Story and Song/The world celebrates the anniversary of Story and Song) into a fluffly little Blupjeans thing that I sincerely hope you enjoy! Happy Candlenights, friend!!!

_ Day One _

The day after the apocalypse starts off disarmingly peaceful, chirping birds and soft sunlight through sheer curtains. It’s normal. It’s normal enough that from a mercifully soft bed in one of the surviving inns of Neverwinter, one wouldn’t be able to tell through the mental fog of a night’s sleep that the world almost ended yesterday. Especially not one who’s woken up the morning after a hundred - now a hundred and one - apocalypses. The end of days starts to lose its sting after a while. So Barry wakes up the same way he has for the past decade, squints up at the ceiling, fumbles one-handed for his glasses, rolls reflexively towards the empty side of the bed, feels a reflexive wrench of panic and  _ wrongness _ in his gut when his arm wraps around thin air. 

It’s different, this time, though. It’s different from the mornings he’d do this in musty inns and ragged tents and the occasional cave when he was running around as Fleshboy McBrainless, unable to rationalize the way fear and grief and longing would slam down through his bones in a locomotive impact at the sight of an empty bed that, as far as he could tell, had always been empty. It’s different from the days where he just accepted that the routine of waking up was something that typically involved hyperventilating and sobbing for a few minutes and not knowing why, because now he  _ knows _ who that absence in his arms belongs to, knows the source of the missing warmth beside him that the deepest part of him was never truly able to forget. He  _ remembers, _ then he remembers that he remembers, and then he remembers that oh, yeah, he helped stop the destruction of the multiverse yesterday.

Ah, nice to be back at the office after ten-plus years of hiding in caves and speaking in riddles.

The knot of unease in his stomach doesn’t loosen though - not when the avalanche of information from a hundred years of fighting-running-loving is still trying to process its way through his already overloaded brain and jumbles up into a fragmented thought process of  _ Lup Lup Lup oh gods where’s Lup no no no not again just got her back where is she can’t lose her again-- _

Barry stops. Sucks in a deep breath through his nose, blows it out through his mouth. Puts on his glasses and mentally reasserts that he’s a man of science, dammit, not a creature of instinct, tells himself to use his big stupid logic brain, genius; it’s all you’ve ever been good for. Reigns that panicked rush of thought into something calmer and more concise.  _ Facts: Lup was here when I went to sleep. Lup is in her spectral form and thus doesn’t require sleep (oh gods she’s still in ghost mode have to help her have to fix this it’s all my fault shut up shut up shut up instinct-brain). Hypothesis: Lup went somewhere nearby and didn’t wake me up. Evidence for hypothesis: she does this all the fucking time (and last time she did it she was gone for years and I had to forget her again and again and again I can’t do this again no no no shut UP instinct-brain). Experiment: Go find her, dumbass. Prognosis for results: I always do. Always. _

Hopefully this time it’ll be easier than a decade falling off of mountains and dying a time or seven and repeatedly making the impossible choice for his head to forget what waking up next to her felt like even though there wasn’t a magic in existence that could make his soul forget it. They’ve been through enough. They’ve been through  _ enough _ ; they deserve something good in all this hell.

Most of Neverwinter is still sleeping, allowing themselves some respite on the morning after which, by all accounts, everything should have ended. The sunlight is muted through clouds and the air is crisp, cool and spring-damp as Barry ducks outside the door of the inn, red robe shrugged heavy and familiar over his shoulders and wand twirling idly between his fingers. The city’s quieter than it ever is, but it’s less of an ominous silence and more of a soft one, a hard-won peace clinging to the rafters and the cobblestones, broken only by the occasional birdsong and a weird, wet rustling sound coming from the mouth of the alley across the street. Raising an eyebrow, Barry jaywalks across the empty roadway and rounds the corner of the alley.

Lup’s there because of  _ course _ she left him to his panicked awakening so she could go do something weird, knelt and hovering an inch above the ground as her skeletal, incorporeal hands rake through something on the ground in front of her with a cacophony of nasty squishing noises. When the structural integrity of the Hunger collapsed, it left behind piles of this ectoplasmic black-opal goo that Barry hasn’t had time to sample and analyze yet. Lup is currently clawing through one of said goo-piles and cursing under her breath, either oblivious to his presence or too busy to acknowledge it.

“Whatcha lookin’ for?” Barry asks, hands in his pockets, awkwardly shifting his weight up to his toes and then rocking back onto his heels. She’s fire and fury and cosmic force, and there’s still a part of him that’s scared she’s a good dream, part of him that wants to touch her so bad it hurts but would hurt more from the feeling of his fingers touching nothing but smoke and sparks and arcane energy. It’s the worst kind of sensation, making up for all that lost time missing someone he didn’t even know by missing her from three feet away.

Lup growls, and there’s righteous indignation in the sound, a lick of flames shooting down her fingers and into the Hunger-goo as she snarls, “My  _ boot. _ ”

Barry blinks. “Your what, now?”

“My  _ boot, _ Barry, come on,” Lup shoots back impatiently, yanking one hand out of the goo with a  _ schlorp  _ and snapping her bony fingers at him as if to say,  _ Keep up, dear. _ He tilts his head to the side and she groans in frustration, clawing downward again. “Cycle thirty-eight. This bitch ate half of my favorite pair of boots.  _ Just the one boot, _ the spiteful motherfucker, and I could  _ never  _ find another pair like them. I  _ know _ it kept that fucking boot as a trophy and I.  _ Want. It. Back. _ ”

There’s a beat of silence, and then Barry starts laughing so hard he nearly falls over, this sweet, aching joy pulling so tightly in his chest that it’s difficult to breathe. It’s a tension and release that he didn’t know he needed until he realizes that he hasn’t really laughed this hard at anything in the last decade-and-some-change, leaning back against the wall of the bakery next door and sliding down to sit beside Lup, just fucking  _ cackling _ .

“You’re an asshole,” says Lup, grudgingly fond.

_ “Just the one boot!” _ Barry howls, as graceless as you please, snorting and tears of mirth and all, clutching his stomach.

If liches can pout, Lup’s doing it. “You’re laughing at me.”

“No, no, I just,” Barry says, still sputtering over leftover laughter as he wipes at his eyes. He gets up until he’s kneeling beside her, reaching out for her hand and feeling the empty hurt of his fingers passing through hers but also feeling her warmth, the ghost of her hand tightening around his. Three squeezes. A silent ‘I love you’ that’s almost a century old. “I just. I missed you.”

“I missed you too, honey,” Lup says, and Barry can hear the eyeroll in the words even if he can’t see it. “Now help me find my boot.”

Barry rolls up his sleeves, pulls a couple of petri dishes out of his bag, and goes elbow-deep in Hunger-goo. They search for three hours and never find the boot in question, laughing, laughing, both of them laughing.

The sun finishes rising. The city wakes up. They’re going to be okay.

_ Day Three _

“You will  _ not,  _ sir, ‘throw hands’ with the Raven Queen,” Kravitz says with a stuffy pair of air-quotes before steepling his fingers and staring Barry down across a long oaken table at the Bureau headquarters, something in his eyes that might be identifiable as danger if Barry even gave one iota of a fuck about anything, and that horse has been out of the barn for about fifty years at this point.

“Who gives a  _ shit _ if I’m a necromancer or a lich or both?!” Barry seethes in response, slamming both hands down on the tabletop and rising quickly to his feet, pointedly ignoring the warning look Lucretia  _ (gods Lucretia with her baby face and bright eyes and notebooks and  years gone in an instant I did this to you kiddo the thing I made did this to you I’m sorry I’m so sorry shut the FUCK up instinct-brain) _ shoots him from the seat beside him. “You and your little undead police squad seem to be missing the part of the memo where I  _ helped save the goddamn planar system.  _ So did Lup. So all I’m saying is that if I have to use a little off-the-books necromancy to get my wife her body back, I’m gonna  _ do the son-of-a-bitchin’ spell, _ and if Boss Lady can’t give me a saved-the-world-pass on this, she’s  _ more  _ than welcome to take it up with me personally.”

“If we bend the rules any more, they’ll break into a million pieces--”

_ “Fuck _ your rules! Did your rules account for the fuckin’ apocalypse falling out of the sky right on top of your heads?! Did your rules save you from it?! No! You know what did?!” Emotional instability isn’t the same for liches as it is for most folks. Barry hasn’t worried about it for a while, but the thought that maybe he should strikes him as the coffee mug next to his hand trembles and shatters in a small explosion of crystalline shards.

“Barry,” Lucretia says. She looks exhausted.

He sucks in a sharp breath, grits his teeth and wills a few flickering tongues of black magic at his fingertips to dissipate.

“You know what did save you?” he asks again, masking the malice behind the question with a carefully-maintained calm. “Lup. And me. Down there on the ground in the middle of all the blood and dark and  _ nasty shit _ that we fought for a  _ hundred years. _ We’re a good asset to have. Your boss? She didn’t find me for over a decade while I was on the run. Now, I’m really goddamn tired of running, but I’m doing that spell. Lup’s getting her body back, and when that happens - when, not if - you can take into account both the fact that we’re a good unit to have in your corner and the fact that if we don’t want to be found, you will  _ never _ find us. I’ll leave the ball in your court, Kravitz.”

The reaper closes his eyes and heaves a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t have the kind of authority it would take to grant that amnesty--”

“Then stop wasting my time and come talk to me when you do.”

Kravitz mutters something under his breath about summoning him to the Raven Queen’s realm later and doing what he can, and then disappears with the sound of ruffling feathers in his wake. Barry storms out of the conference room before Lucretia can get a word in edgewise, a hand pressed to the breast pocket of his shirt to feel the piece of paper inside humming along with the heartbeat he doesn’t need,  _ back-soon, back-soon, back-soon. _ Barry calms himself with the knowledge that, one way or another, he can and  _ will _ make that true.

She’ll be back.

_ Day Seventy-Two _

Tiny blooms of flame dance along the ends of Lup’s fingertips, casting long shadows in the deep blue of just after sunset. Far below their spot on the roof of the bungalow, they can see Magnus and Mavis and Mookie and Angus running back and forth through the sand in the light of a massive bonfire, the peals of their laughter cutting in like gull cries over the roar of waves on the shore. The smell of dinner cooking wafts up from the open windows, and Barry’s stomach growls, reminding him that they’ve been up here for, like, five hours now.

“Go eat, babe,” says Lup, turning the fire between her finger-bones into a long, gleaming ribbon that she absently magics into a bow before she wills it away in a puff of smoke. “I’ll wait. I just… It’s weird for me to be in the kitchen when I can’t eat. I think it bums Taako out.”

She says it with a laugh, but Barry knows her well enough to hear the sadness in it, brushes his fingers across the place where her cheek would be and kisses smoke and sparks instead of her forehead. “The pod’s almost ready. You just have to wait a little longer.”

They stay like that for a while, neither of them saying anything, just the cool breeze and the ocean and the war cries of a bunch of kids climbing all over Magnus on the ground below.

Lup breaks the silence first. “I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining. I mean, hell, it’s just good to be out of the umbrella. It’s been good seeing everything. This world, it’s beautiful.”

Barry remembers waking up in new places every day, never able to outrun an emptiness he couldn’t name, scoffs and lights a cigarette. “I never used to think so.”

Lup calls the fire back to her fingers and starts idly weaving them again, humming snatches of a familiar melody. “And what now? You changed your mind?”

Barry listens to the ocean and the kids laughing and watches her for a while, wreathed in moonlight and flame, and he thinks to himself that she always was the standard that all other beauty failed to measure up to.

“Yeah,” he says. “I changed my mind.”

_ Day One Hundred Twenty-Eight _

Barry wakes up the same way he has for the last decade, squints up at the ceiling, fumbles one-handed for his glasses, rolls reflexively towards the empty side of the bed, feels surprised when the longing and panic doesn’t tighten in his gut because there’s a weight and warmth in his arms that’s supposed to be there and finally,  _ finally  _ is. Lup murmurs something in her sleep, something she doesn’t need but insisted upon regaining her body that she’d missed along with all of life’s other little decadences (the words “I wanna fuck, sleep, and eat, in that order” were uttered).

He loves her. She curls into his chest with a sleepy pout and her eyelashes flutter and she’s back and his and he  _ loves her, _ so much more than searching and dying and saving the world could ever begin to convey. It’s ridiculous that he picks  _ now _ of all times to tear up, but here he goes, steaming up his glasses and trying not to cry because it’ll wake her. Lup sleeps heavily, but not when she’s coming off a decade of not sleeping at all, jolts awake with a confused little chirp before she takes in her surroundings and settles back against Barry’s chest and yawns. “G’morning.”

“Hey,” he says, still half-disbelieving  _ (if I look away there’s a chance she’ll be gone I can’t forget her face again gotta memorize gotta look at her I can’t forget oh my GODS instinct-brain do you ever take a break--) _ , arms tightening around her as he presses his lips to the top of her head and breathes in the smell of her hair, smoke and honey. “Hey. I love you, good morning, hi. I love you.”

Lup kisses him, so soft and sweet and slow that he’s at an alarming risk of fucking crying again, and says, “I love you too. I wanna eat  _ everything. _ ”

Instead of crying, Barry laughs and rolls out of bed, leaning down and pressing his forehead against hers. “One everything, coming up.”

They eat breakfast in bed and end up tangled up in each other for the better part of a day. He  _ loves  _ her, and she  _ loves _ him, says it a million times over the amorphous, stretching hours, and for the first time in years, Barry remembers something he thought the Hunger and the Voidfish had taken from him permanently.

Somewhere in the golden sun of late afternoon, Lup falls asleep again curled up beside him, breaths deep and even, and Barry remembers what  _ okay _ feels like.

_ Day Three Hundred Sixty-Four _

Taako is positively  _ shit-canned, _ double-fisting bottles of champagne and recounting his own heroics for anybody who will listen, which ends up being an impressive amount of people, with it being a celebration for the first anniversary of the Day of Story and Song. Across the room, Merle is going to town on a plate of canapes and Magnus is laughing with Carey about something. Lucretia and Davenport are watching the party from the sidelines, and Barry feels the warm weight of Lup’s arm hooking through his as she comes up behind him, resplendent with her sparkly gold dress and her hair all done up. She smiles, and it’s got to be ten shades of stupid that Barry still goes weak in the knees after over a century.

“All this hoopla for little old us,” she muses with a wink, sipping a champagne flute and watching the party orbit around them. “Who’d have thunk it?”

Barry shrugs, bumping her shoulder with his and grinning. “We did save the world, kinda.”

“Yeah, kinda,” she nods. “It’s just that with everything, with all those years and all that happened, I guess I never imagined us ending up here.”

“Who’s ending up anywhere?” Barry asks, watching Taako put a lampshade on his head with a fond expression. “Endings don’t exactly exist for us, babe. We’re here, but we’re not ending here. This is more like the middle.”

“Ugh, you’re philosopher-drunk again,” Lup says, rolling her eyes and leaving a big gold lipstick-print on his cheek before she tugs at his arm to lead him to the balcony outside the ballroom.  “C’mon, Nerd Alert, the fireworks are gonna start.”

All of Neverwinter is out in the streets, hopeful faces upturned to a sky thick-laced with stars, counting down the seconds until a year since the world should have ended, and Barry can’t help but feel oddly disconnected from them all, unable to put any quantitative marker on how this monumental year has passed. When you live forever, you stop counting your life in seconds and days and years, start plotting your mark upon the universe with  _ those _ moments, the important ones that stick with you and sink down to your center, that make it impossible for your soul to forget. Hunger-goo stuck under his fingernails. The moment of furious willingness to fight Death itself for her. The sound of waves and the flicker of fire on Lup’s hands. The smell of smoke and honey. Those are how Barry marks the passage of time. They seem more worthwhile than the swelling chant below.

“Five, four, three--”

“Two,” he whispers, not looking to the clock or the crowds or the sky, but looking at Lup, at how she glows under the party lights, at how he loves her more than a hundred worlds could contain.

“One,” she whispers back, pressing her lips to his.

_ Day Three Hundred Sixty-Five _

He loves her. They’re safe. They’re okay. Endings don’t exist, not for them, but Barry is content to stay in this happy middle they’ve carved out for themselves for as long as Lup will be here, holding his hand. Three squeezes. A silent ‘I love you.’

The fireworks explode overhead in a roaring shower of sparks, and Barry squeezes her hand back.


End file.
